Teaming of Mickey and Goofy

[Frank Bubacz]

Olivier wrote:

>Goofy's simple-mindedness makes for more serious gags: not slapstick >but
>character-driven [...] therefore [he is] a better companion for Mickey 
>[...] I am not sure Gottfredson would have kept using Donald; once
>in a while, for variety, but in the end, I guess he would have >stopped 
>anyway.

That's what our subconscious desperately wants to make us believe, isn't it? 
;-) Mickey and Goofy just fit together too well, also from a visual, 
esthetic point of view. The duo just seems to have evolved naturally. But: 
at that time Disney comics still paid a lot of attention to what happened in 
the cartoons (even some of their themes were adopted) and as I have said 
before there's not even one cartoon that shows Mickey and Goofy as a duo. 
Which is even more irritating in the light of about half a dozen cartoons 
that couple Goofy with Donald, even long after both had become solo stars. 
So were Mickey and Goofy really meant for each other from the outset?


Gerd wrote:

>Donald disappeared from the MM strip at about the same time when he
>began to appear regularly within the Silly Symphonies Sunday pages. >This
>has been attributed to the fact that the MM and the SS strips were
>sometimes sold to rivaling newspapers, so the paper which bought the SS
>strip wouldn't have approved of Donald also appearing in the
>competitor's paper.

This adds to my assumption that the reasons leading to the "creation" of one 
of the leading duos in comic history were rather profane. What Gerd says 
seems to be proven by the fact that you can't even see the tip of the tail 
of a Mickey in all of the 67 Silly Symphony Sunday pages featuring DD, 
whilst Goofy and other "mouse universe" characters can be seen very often.

In short: Horace's star was already fading in the cartoons of the time, so 
he wasn't the ideal companion for Mickey anymore, and Donald had to be 
cancelled for business reasons. The only remaining option was Goofy. It 
wasn't a natural teaming, but I'm sure Gottfredson and his collaborators 
noticed very soon that they were on the right track.

Does this still make sense? Not sure, but I'll post it anyway...

Frank


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